Banking-as-a-service platform Treasury Prime has laid off about half of its roughly 100 employees, CEO Chris Dean confirmed.
As part of a strategic shift to focus solely on selling to banks, Treasury Prime has laid off a team focused on selling its products to other fintechs, including marketing.
The company has previously pitched itself to fintechs and then connected them with bank partners who use Treasury Prime’s platform, but Dean said the “interesting activity” over the past six months has been working directly with banks, who are willing to negotiate and strike deals directly with fintechs rather than through Treasury Prime.
“If that’s where the puck is going, let’s go there now,” Dean said, confirming a development first reported on LinkedIn by Fintech Business Weekly publisher Jason Mikula.
He said Treasury Prime is first and foremost a software company, and its original intention was for banks on its platform to find their own fintech partners.
“[But] The number of fintechs wanting to talk to banks far exceeded what the banks could handle, so they turned to us, and we built a go-to-market team over the years to support them. [into a category of middlemen]”We don’t really think of ourselves that way,” Dean said.
“And at some point [in the] “In the last six months, we’ve realised that what we wanted to do when we started has finally caught up with both the regulatory environment and the banks. So let’s just do it directly. It’s better for business. It’s better for the banks, it’s better for the fintechs, the regulators like it, it’s better all around,” he said.
The cuts come a year after the company raised $40 million in a Series C round and after a year of triple-digit growth.
Dean said the 40 to 50 employees affected by the layoffs had received “generous severance packages”, adding that the cuts were “like a body blow”.
“But from the business side, everyone asks me, ‘Oh, this is what everyone wants to do and this is where all our revenue comes from, why don’t we do it directly?’ [if] “We’re going to run out of money. No, we have money for years. That’s not the issue here,” Dean said. “We’re just trying to reflect the realities of the world. When the questions change, the answers change. And the questions have changed in the last few years.”
